[meteorite-list] Meteorites as hosts for seeds of life

From: MexicoDoug_at_aol.com <MexicoDoug_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed Jul 20 02:58:27 2005
Message-ID: <1c7.2ccbf057.300f500b_at_aol.com>

>Ah yes - Hollywood; ever the source of wit. Half of it, anyway.

> ...and vacuum is a gift that keeps on giving. It doesn't just give us
>a lack of air - it boils water, leaving dessicated wreckage where cells
>used to be. Hardly comparable with a scuba diver's environment.

Right, sweat "boils" right here on earth if you want to put it that way, and
lips get chapped if you don't remember the chapstick, so what.
 
The original post discusses halite crystals found in meteorites and produced
in evaporative environments. These crystals are naturally bottled water/ice
in space. They appear to be quite effective natural space capsules
(especially if a hardened spores were inside, like those found in the New Mexican
Caverns). Further, halite crystals have been shown to hitchhike protected on
meteorites like Zag, among others. The pressure comparison I make is fine and
relevant when discussing the integrity of the crystals. A vacuum isn't much
of a hurdle pressurewise given these capsules. If you wish to discuss scuba
diving or other obvious situations on how to kill organisms, you've missed
the point, have a different point to make, just want to be disagreeable, or
some combination of the three.
 
Common halite crystals could be an ideal vector for the interplanetary
transport of bacterial spores. The pressures of a vacuum is weak enough that a
standard bottle of Evian mineral water, properly twisted shut would have no
problem with reasonable headspace(i.e., not filled to the top), to float around
space near the Earth's orbit, and be no where near its burst point. That is
another example of pressure as was the 10 meter sea depth, to make a point
that the stresses caused by vacuum pressures are not always the problem
Hollywood makes them to be, and just fine for bottle water in salt capsules.
Saludos, Doug
Received on Wed 20 Jul 2005 02:58:19 AM PDT